Chris Foley to close upscale grocery at former Twitter HQ

First Twitter moved out. Now The Market, a luxury grocer in the Mid-Market building in San Francisco, will pack its high-end bananas because of a “gazillion dollars” lost to crime.

The 22,000-square-foot market, owned by developer Chris Foley, will close its doors Friday at the former Twitter headquarters at 1355 Market Street, the San Francisco Standard reported.

The Food Hall, with a half-dozen restaurants surrounding the grocery, will remain open.

“The landlord did nothing but support us, but we finally looked at what was happening, and we were losing a gazillion dollars every month and made a decision,” Foley told the newspaper.

In 2014, Foley opened The Market on the ground-floor of the 11-story Art Deco building known as Market Square, owned by locally based Shorenstein Properties and JPMorgan Chase.

At the time, Twitter was Twitter, now X, and such tech firms as Uber, Dropbox, and Airbnb clustered nearby, drawn to the neighborhood by a Mid-Market tax break offered by the city.

For the Market, sales and foot traffic gradually improved, with the grocer marking its best year in 2019.

Then the pandemic led to remote work, emptying out nearby offices. The city shut down, companies pulled out, businesses collapsed. In 2022, Twitter was bought by Elon Musk, who moved the renamed X to Austin, Texas.

Mid-Market and The Market were increasingly inundated by people troubled by drug addiction, homelessness and mental illness.

“Mayor Breed allowed meth addicts and homeless to take over the streets and it didn’t seem that her administration really cared, and I’m sorry to say that,” Foley told the Standard.

Breed’s administration launched a Drug Market Agency Coordination Center near Civic Center. The center, run by the city and federal agencies, aimed to stanch open-air drug sales and use.

Nonetheless, employees and customers at The Market were regularly accosted. Foley said he heard from friends and neighbors they stopped coming because of confrontations in front of the store. The grocer’s hot bar closed when street people used their hands to dig out food.

Daily sales at The Market plummeted from $60,000 to $2,200, according to Foley. Local businesses such as Huckleberry Bikes, Littlejohn’s Candies and Whole Foods, faced with similar street conditions, moved out.

“Nobody gave a fuck,” Foley told the newspaper. In addition to crime, Foley blames the vacant offices, now the subject of a return-to-office push by Mayor Daniel Lurie.

Foley, now developing a 20-unit condo building at 2201 Market Street in Duboce Triangle, says it pays to be optimistic.

“It’s going to get better,” Foley told the Standard. “San Francisco still has Silicon Valley, Tahoe, Santa Cruz, the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

“But (a turnaround is) going to take a while, especially for Mid-Market.”

— Dana Bartholomew